We were attempting a batch job to convert around 450 documents from Word to PDF using the GroupDocs API. After a few hours we noticed that over 100 documents were Pending. We decided to let it sit overnight and they were still listed as Pending the next morning. Finally, we manually restarted each of the conversion processes through our GroupDocs Dashboard and they finished over the next hour or so.

What caused these documents to get stuck in Pending status, and what can we do to avoid this issue in the future.

We’re using v2.0 of the platform. After manually restarting the jobs, we were able to get the documents converted from Word to PDF.

But now we are having a different issue. The document conversions are displayed as “Completed” on our GroupDocs’ dashboard, but when we tried to pull them down to our S3 bucket we believe the API is refusing to retrieve our completed jobs.

Here are the operations we are running: 1) upload_file_to_groupdocs to put our copy of the file onto GroupDocs server, 2) start_groupdocs_file_conversion to convert that uploaded file, and 3) retrieve_groupdocs_render to save the resultant file to S3 and save the path to our db so we can access it later.

At first, some of the retrieve_groupdocs_render tasks were aborting after 10 retries because the status was either “Scheduled”, “Pending”, or even worse, “Postponed”.

For the “Postponed” jobs, we manually restarted them from the Dashboard. One by one.

Then we stripped the arguments out of the logs and repeated the retrieve_groupdocs_render tasks. The latest issue was that start_groupdocs_file_conversion was not returning a job uid, which we assume means the service was not accepting our job.

FYI, we may be approaching our limit of 750 operations per month, but our understanding was that each additional operation would cost $0.15, so there should be no reason that the operations would get cut off because we ran over our limit.

Please let us know how we should proceed to retrieve the remaining jobs.

Thank you for coming back. Did you try to configure your S3 as a storage for the GroupDocs account as shown on this screenshot. With such configuration you will not need to upload your documents to the GroupDocs server - it will work directly with your S3 and the issue could be resolved.

As for the how to get remaining jobs - you can get this info via this API call

We haven’t, and may, but how does that relate to document conversions? We didn’t have any trouble uploading documents to GroupDocs. We had trouble with conversion jobs; over a hundred were stuck in a Postponed state. Why did that happen?

We understand that some of the later requests were refused altogether because we reached our monthly limit. But how can we make sure that jobs don’t get stuck in a Postponed state in the future?

Thank you for coming back. To avoid such issue in the future you can do next: implement a counter which will check the number of the requests you done - and then compare it with the number of allowed requests which you can get from your account.

As for the postponed jobs - can you please share with me your GroupDocs account email and the date when the jobs are stuck that I can check the logs.